Spainaird At The Door

Today, while I was mid "salute the sun" during my yoga video in the living room, I heard a knock at the door. I was surprised because the knock by no means was a China knock, which usually consists of a harsh banging, an attempt to open the very locked door and repeated yelling all within a matter of seconds. No, this was a faint and perhaps even foreign knock. I opened the door and a woman about mid-thirty was standing there with one of the senior English teachers at her side. She had a mid sized back pack on and was drenched from the rain.

She came in after telling the teacher thank you for taking her from the main gate of the school to my apartment and proceeded to put her stuff on the floor. Now you can imagine my surprise at this point, as I have never known a western foreigner to come to Wulingyuan the entire 8 months that I have been here. She explained that she was walking around town and someone came up to her and with a brief exchange of words gave her my phone number. I later managed to figure out that this random Chinese solicitor was in fact my friend Mr. Zhong, who naturally thought he should send this wandering European looking soul my way, but still at the time struck me as all very odd. So this lone traveler landed on my door step and was somply looking for some advice and a dry place to put down her pack on this rainy evening.

She explained that her name is Kristina, she's Spanish and she has managed to hitch hike from Spain to Hunan China. She started in Spain, traveling to Russia, Mongolia, northern China, Shanghai and then cut across to Hunan. She managed to go this whole distance without paying for a single train or plane ticket and only a handful of bus tickets. Her goal is to hitch hike from Spain to India. She was very friendly, a little loopy but had lots to share with me about her travels, including an impressive dvd of pictures. Her pictures from her Mongolian winter were incredible! She hitch hiked through the Gobi desert alone in the middle of winter! She stayed in yurt houses with local Mongolian families and lived off of rice, yak meat and grain alcohol for nearly a month.

She said that her travels only became really excited when she entered into China. She claims that the way she gets around hitch hiking in China is to stand on the pay toll islands and wait for people to stop and drill her with a barrage of questions. She has been picked up by the police several times in China and taken to police stations where she has to claim that she actually wants to hitch hike and that she doesn't need to be driven to the nearest big city. I can see this being a bit of a common problem for the average white faced foreigner as Hunan is not exactly the Disneyland or Golden Gate bridge of China. It's more like the Arkansas of China with some counties just south of me that are so underdeveloped that foreigners aren't allowed step foot in within the county lines. If you happen to find yourself in such counties you can be picked up by the local police and put on the next train bound for the capital city of Changsha. Additionally, Kristin doesn't speak any Chinese so I can't really imagine how any of these conversations and explanations happen. I have a hard enough time flagging down mini vans with door missing and trying to convince them that I actually do know where I'm going and that I intentionally want to go to some random town in the next county over.

The Chinese bumpkins who she hitches these rides from must think she has absolutely lost it, as the Chinese refuse to see why western travelers voluntarily like to "rough it," ala lonely planet style. People even have a hard time watching me take off for the weekend with my backpack on or even head out to the fields and go running for an hour or so. For people who have spent their lives doing back breaking labor and riding on the hard bed of a truck to and from work, they can't imagine why a person from a developed country would willingly submit themselves to this "real life" experience.

So Kristin asked to leave her things in my apartment and headed out of the school with only a raincoat on and a few yuan in her pocket. She refused to stay in my apartment as she knew that i wasn't expecting her and really didn't want to impose. I have no idea where she is planning to stay but I guess I will hear more about her travels tomorrow when she comes to pick up her things. I thought I was living a random China life but she seems to take the notion of unpredictable and boundless adventure to another level.